Comclean With Retime

[landru22]

Erik,

Thanks for all of your hard work on commercial editing. I used comclean (V006) and then retime to edit out commercials and fix the joins. Unfortunately, the audio was slightly off in the final version. Is there a fix for that? Has anyone else reported this kind of discrepency?

Other than that, I really liked the speed and ease of these two apps. I liked that I am able to use the .txt file from comskip and edit the location of the commercials by simply editing the frame numbers in the txt file.

Keep up the good work!

[erik]

Did you know that you do not have to manually edit the contents of the text file but that you can use comskip to do the editing?

Invoke comskip with as its single argument the full filename of the .txt file you want to edit. (or drag the .txt file and drop it on the comskip executable)
Use the 'n' and the 'p' key to quickly jump to the cut points, review them, change them, insert of delete complete commercials and write the resulting cutlist into the .txt file. (details are in the debugwindow.rtf file)
No need to edit all those numbers by hand!

The multiplex utility unfortunatily has no parameter to adjust the audio offset.
Maybe someone else knows a trick.

[David]

I finally got the retime batch file working today. My preliminary tests show it is working fine for me. Audio is synced with the video. I will test further.

[landru22]

I tried a different file with Comclean/Retime combo and the audio is correctly in sync. I'm not sure why my first attempt was unsuccessful. I'll probably make a third attempt on a different file later in the week.

Some time ago, I created DVD's from mpeg's that I didn't realize had the timing issue. The mpeg's are no longer on my pc or backed up anywhere else. Is the a way (using free programs please!) to fix the timing on these? I guess I would have to go from DVD to mpeg and then try to figure out where I made the cuts on the original mpeg's. Any suggestions?

Thanks

[erik]

You should be able to use retime to do the job.
The demuxer used in retime should be able to demux a vob file directly
SO,

Copy the vob file to your HDD.
Rename the vob file such that it has a .mpg extension instead of a .vob extension.
run retime on the vob file (the renamed file with the mpg extension). This creates a mpg without the timing errors
use your common tools to put the resultin mpeg back onto a DVD

One warning, I did not test it but the documentation says it should work.

If renaming does not work (becuase bbdmux gives an error) you can use below batch file

------------------------------------
Rem demux the vob file
bbdmux "%~dpn1.vob" 0xe0 "%~dpn1.m2v"
bbdmux "%~dpn1.vob" 0xc0 "%~dpn1.mp2"
Rem Mulxiplex again to a regular mpeg file
mplex1 "%~dpn1.m2v" "%~dpn1.mp2" "%~dpn2.mpg"
del "%~dpn1.m2v"
del "%~dpn1.mp2"
---------------------

[landru22]

Thanks Erik. I'll give it a try and let you know.

[ww4397]

Did you know that you do not have to manually edit the contents of the text file but that you can use comskip to do the editing?

Invoke comskip with as its single argument the full filename of the .txt file you want to edit. (or drag the .txt file and drop it on the comskip executable)
Use the 'n' and the 'p' key to quickly jump to the cut points, review them, change them, insert of delete complete commercials and write the resulting cutlist into the .txt file. (details are in the debugwindow.rtf file)
No need to edit all those numbers by hand!

Erik,

Can the resultant cut list be writen to a Cuttermaran .cpf file rather than (or in addition to) a .txt file? I'd really like to not hand edit the .cpf file because it is tedious and it needs show segments rather than comercial segments.

Thanks.

[erik]

comskip78beta does that.
It writes to ALL selected output formats after editing.
I rewrote the output generation part so please feedback if you find any errors.

[ww4397]

comskip78beta does that.
It writes to ALL selected output formats after editing.
I rewrote the output generation part so please feedback if you find any errors.

I just did a quick check and dropped a .txt file on the comskip executable and it generated an output .cpf file. I then compared the .cpf cutpoints with the .txt file cutpoints and noticed "EndPosition" in the .cpf file was equal to the start point of the commercials in the .txt file. I was expecting it to be 1 frame less (i.e "EndPosition" = start point - 1).

The "StartPosition" values in the .cpf file looked correct. They were 1 frame greater than the end point values in the .txt file.

Thanks.

[erik]

Will be corrected in the next build
There is a small problem. If you load a TXT file and do NOT write out (even when you did not change anything) then comskip clears all selected output files to zero length, so ALWAYS hit the 'w' button if you do need the selected output files.